Nvidia is in a privileged position. Whether the team there believes it or not, every innovation that comes out of its research and development department will show up sooner or later in hundreds of mainstream titles and technologies.
Don’t believe me? Look at the GPU.
Twenty years ago the concept of a discrete graphics processing unit wasn’t something that consumers had much interest in. But, come 1999, that story changed when Nvidia launched its 256 card. In the time since its launch, Nvidia has produced dozens of cards, each improving on that early model. The point here is that the original wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t matter. It was innovative and, in the end, that’s what made it ubiquitous with gamers.
When trying out Grid, Nvidia’s game-streaming service that’s 10-years in the making, this is exactly how I feel: It may not be perfect but, along with its console counterpart PlayStation Now, it’s the beginning of something big in a way that services like OnLive never were.
Before we can dig in with comparisons of how Grid performs under real-world conditions, we should review what Grid is, how it works and what you’ll need to try it out for yourself.
Grid, like PlayStation Now, is a cloud game-streaming service. Using remote, proprietary servers, Nvidia performs the graphics-heavy processing needed to play AAA titles and then streams the results to your Shield Tablet or Portable. It’s constantly doing this dozens of times per second, as well as taking input from your controller and sending it back to the server.
As you can imagine, you need a pretty fast wifi connection to make this all happen. Nvidia recommends connection speeds of at least 10Mbps for 60fps, though, you won’t see really smooth, console-like quality gameplay until around 30Mbps. So long as you have an 802.11n or 802.11ac “game stream-ready” router and a mid-level Internet service package you should be fine. However, anything less than that, and the quality of your stream will completely detract from the gaming experience. Here at TechRadar HQ, we had around the 30Mbps connection speed, and at home could muster around 25Mbps down and 7Mbps up - but neither of these two connections were through game-stream ready routers, which is important to note for the performance section coming later in the review.
Lastly, before we continue, the service only works on Shield Tablet or Shield Portable and is limited for the time-being to North America, though there are plans in place to roll it out globally over the next few months starting with the rest of North America and Western Europe and ending with Asia Pacific.
While it may sound irksome to wait a few months for service, I can promise you that when it does come to your territory you’ll be getting an even better experience than the one here in the US. Nvidia plans on adding several games every month to reach “a PlayStation Now-sized library of over 100 games by this time next year.”
However, that doesn’t mean US gamers will be left out in the cold until then. There’s about twenty games on the Shield Hub available right now. They include: Alan Wake: American Nightmare, Astebreed, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Brutal Legend, Darksiders, Darksiders 2, Dead Island, Dirt 2, LEGO Batman 2, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, Race Driver Grid, Saints Row: The Third, Street Fighter x Tekken, Strike Suit Zero, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, Trine 2 and Ultra Street Fighter IV. This is the initial launch lineup in its entirety, though I was told to expect the Tim Schafer sleeper hit Psychonauts to be along sometime in the next month or so.
Nvidia is clearly leveraging its relationship with publishers to get AAA games on here from the very beginning. Yes, the point can be made that a few too many of these are from 2010, but it’s impressive that the service is launching with many of the games we’re still waiting for on PlayStation Now. What’s going to push the platform moving forward the most, however, are consistent updates that bring more recent and popular games to the Hub page.
Page 1 of 2Introduction and game library
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